Saturday, May 11, 2013

Most people in America still think of a foreign sports car when they hear the word Benghazi.

The right wingnuts are hoping that all of this will change as more information emerges about what transpired before and after the attack on a US outpost consulate in Libya.

Over at FOX NEWS if I had a dollar for every time one of their hosts said Benghazi I could buy the state of Texas and solve world hunger. But sadly for them it is just not sticking right now. And, you have to ask yourself, if it does stick, who will it stick to and for how long?

I am going to take a guess and say that it will not stick to either Hillary or the beige dude currently occupying the White House.

Although you have to believe that the people around Hillary are sweating a little these days. 2016 is four years away and a lot can happen between now and the next presidential election.

The good news for them is that their enemies belong to the republican party, and those folks have a way of overplaying their hand. They always find a way to snap defeat from the jaws of victory.

But the FOX News barrage against all things O seems to be having an effect on the White House. Today they tried to calm the Benghazi waters by reassuring the American people that there is nothing to see and we should move along to more important issues.

Most of us normal people can put it in its proper context and see it for the political witch hunt that it is. But the White House should listen to people like David Horn who wrote the following:

"The latest revelations about the Benghazi talking points—as opposed to what actually happened at the US diplomatic facility at Benghazi, where four Americans died—do not back up Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham's hyperbolic and absurd claim that the Benghazi controversy is Obama's Watergate. But neither are they nothing.As ABC News reported on Friday morning, the most discussed talking points in US diplomatic history were revised multiple times before being passed to UN Ambassador Susan Rice prior to her appearances last September on Sunday talk shows. The revisions—which deleted several lines noting that the CIA months before the attack had produced intelligence reports on the threat of Al Qaeda-linked extremists in Benghazi—appear to have been driven by State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, who, it should be noted, is a career Foggy Bottomer who has served Republican and Democratic administrations, not a political appointee. Her motive seems obvious: fend off a CIA CYA move that could make the State Department look lousy. (The other major deletion concerned three sentences about a possible link between the attack and Ansar al-Sharia, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group; last November, David Petraeus, the former CIA chief, testified that this information was removed from the talking points in order to avoid tipping off the group.)/But here's the problem for the White House: It was part of the interagency process in which State sought to downplay information that might have raised questions about its preattack performance. That's a minor sin (of omission). Yet there's more: On November 28, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, "Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC's best assessments of what they thought had happened. The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word 'consulate' to 'diplomatic facility because 'consulate' was inaccurate."Assuming the talking points revisions released by ABC News are accurate—and the White House has not challenged them—Carney's statement was not correct. The State Department did far more than change one word, and it did so in a process involving White House aides. So, White House critics can argue, Carney put out bad information and did not acknowledge that State had massaged the talking points to protect itself from inconvenient questions.This is not much of cover-up. There is no evidence the White House is hiding the truth about what occurred in Benghazi. My colleague Kevin Drum dismisses this recent Benghazi news ("on a scale of 1 to 10, this is about a 1.5"). But the White House has indeed been caught not telling the full story. Despite Carney's statement, there was politically minded handling of the talking points. Yet in today's hyperpartisan environment, such a matter cannot be evaluated with a sense of proportion. Obama antagonists decry it as a deed most foul, and White House defenders denounce the the critics. The talking points dispute is not a scandal; it's a mess—a small mess—"

22 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I beg to differ. Bush's spokespeople and staff did not create aq 'small mess' in Iraq..they created a fullscale, montrous war with lies. Bush's appointees did not leave a 'small mess' economically; they took a budget surplus and spent it away and billions more, with no accountability. Bush's terror advisors, including Yoo and Cheney, did not leave a 'small mess,' they left tortured people and Gitmo behind to be cleaned up by this administration. Now, it is troubling that these Obama folks deleted information, BUT I counter that none of this is anywhere near the scale of the Bush actions, which are impeachable offenses, despite what HE was told. And I haven't even mentioned the deadly attacks on our embassies while Bush was in charge. The real issue is that this administration is held, somehow, to a much higher standard than any other. Obama is expected to know all, to act with total honesty every second, and to never ever make a mistake of any kind. The right has been trying to impeach him since before he was even in office. Racchel Maddow had a great piece the other night, showing clips of Congressmen bloviating to the press about this or that 'crime' of a President gone awry, an executive branch gone rogue..and they were not talking about Bush. No, no one ever blames white Bush for any sin. But Obama? Oh my. Meanwhile, it seems dear Bush cannot leave this country for fear of being charged with the war crimes he committed. Too bad those charges didn't originate here.

I agree, this is just another SMALL mess that the right will be responsible for for the next 20 yrs

At the same time they will continue to plan ahead for 2016 THINKING that Hillary, will run. Meanwhile electing, removing and stigmatizing poor people and doing all manner of evil to those whom they dismiss as being the so called 47%

The best thing about this is that Barak H Obama cannot run again. And we all bet$$$ that is his happiest time of all

Field: I am on my way to Northwestern to learn about defending those on death row. I turned down a position as a clerk on the hill because i could not justify being in the employ of a rightwing judge..so u have some idea of my politic. Not as dramatic as my kin but its mine

Bottom line, I sense that for eye man this is simply a topic for your blog and that like iself WHO GIVES A Muck? really?Case in pointThis entire POLITRICKS process is a joke, and for those who have nothing its even less of an issue.

My parents tell us that Barak is part of the problem, and perhaps that is true However, i look at the people who voted twice. I do not vote,( one of the issues with my appt to the Clerk position) i refuse to vote, but i still pay taxes, so I open my mouth and like mom spkmypeace/not piece

Nice PieceLike Mom there is no shame in my space, i have been there done that I am a MAN

Most people in America still think of a foreign sports car when they hear the word Benghazi.

Isn't that indicative of something Field? If Fox is over-hyping the story, it is only because of a near complete black-out by the rest of the media.

And judging by the mindless, reflexively tribal response of your first two commenters, it wouldn't matter anyway if the truth was well-known to the American people. Feckless incompetence and moral bankruptcy mean nothing to your average democrat, as long as it's their people in power.

And this is no small mess. It is much worse than Watergate, where the Nixon administration tried to cover up the gung-ho efforts of a couple of idiots who broke into a campaign office. The Obama administration ignored pleas from the Libyan diplomatic staff for more security and then, when a terrorist attack occurred on the anniversary of 9-11, denied help to the besieged consulate because they didn't want to escalate the situation due to political considerations. They then lied to the whole country by blaming the incident on a You Tube video nobody had heard of (the producer is still in jail). They lied and lied and lied about what they had done before, during and after Benghazi, and demoted anyone who did not go along sufficiently with their lying. They failed to pursue the real culprits in Libya, because that would shine a light on their lies.

As usual, once the media can no longer deny a scandal on the left, they then try to minimize it by labeling it trivial. And you are right there to do your part. Because all that matters at this point is saving Hillary's political career.

Are you so loyal to the left that you will deny the truth? Because that kind of attitude has led to an increasingly unaccountable government. And we know where that leads.

IQ tests are culturally biased. They are based on American culture. Also they measure the degree of education. ---------------------

Indeed. Saying that Blacks and Hispanics score perpetually lower on IQ tests tha "Jews" "Asians" and "Whites" is to report a truism, not a truth. It doesn't offer a description so much as it acknowledges a prescription.

It's been discussed in the relevant journals since the mid '70s. The test assesses raw intelligence by using cultural literacy as a proxy for intelligence. Jews and Asians in the '20s and '30s used to test as low as the Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Irish who all used to be considered as intrinsically defective as Blacks and Hispanics (though not quite so defective as Blacks). As the "lesser" Europeans were absorbed into the generalized American "whiteness" of WWII and beyond, and the Jews and East Asians became "model minorities" through assimilation on steroids, their scores rose correspondingly and both groups came to be broadly considered either white or "whitish." Hispanics show every sign of eventual inclusion in whiteness as 3rd and even 2nd generations lose their elders languages and cultures to the great American melting pot. Which leaves, perpetually, Black Americans who by definition cannot assimilate into whiteness (because whiteness exists only in opposition to blackness) and are thus doomed to be the negative standard on any acceptable measure of worth in white America are judged.

White folks for the most part, refuse to turn the page of history. They still haven't convinced anyone but themselves and a hanf full of House Negroes that they are in fact more intelligent merely due to phenotypical characteristics.

Field, the House Republican's idea is in complete harmony with Joe McCarthy's philosophy of repeated interrogation of people called to appear before his House Un-American Committe. The concept is simply this if you insist on EXACT SPECIFICS in detail regarding events and/or timelines from a group of people - and you do it over and over on a sequence of days - the exact specific information of their testimonies WILL EVENTUALLY CHANGE. This is simply because it is the subconscious nature of human beings to either gloss or enhance details of any story no matter how simple or unremarkable it might be. McCarthy knew this and he used it to perfection to create an atmosphere of NATIONAL fear of his ongoing communist/pinko inquisitions.

Chairman Issa is doing his level best to channel Joe McCarthy over the deadly Benghazi incident. However he is no way as clever as McCarthy when it comes to questioning people appearing before his committee. So instead of creating fear he is just wearing out the patience of the public who are more concerned about JOBS.

I saw the first video that aired on CNN literally minutes after the attack and there is no way that anybody could figure out what was going on in the midst of the confusion between the ongoing street protests over the anti-muslim movie and the attack on the American facility. Roving gangs were every where. Some people running with sticks and others with guns. Chaos ruled the streets and out of it all suddenly explosions started going off in the American compound. Meanwhile there was no let up in the mobs roving around in the streets. The mistake that the White House made was trying to make the public believe that they understood every chronological event that took place on the streets and it is my opinion that as of today NO ONE, EVEN the natives themselves knows exactly every detail of what was happening on the mob controlled streets of Benghazi Libya that particular night.

What's the big deal if there are IQ differences between races? We know there are differences in sprinting ability between the races - that's not a problem, is it?

Just because one race might have an average IQ higher than another says nothing about individuals.

We need to stop trying to enforce a false racial equality across all areas of human endeavor. Once you acknowledge differences, you can acknowledge that the NBA isn't racist, nor is the physics faculty at Harvard, and start treating people as individuals, like Yao Ming and Neil Degrasse Tyson.

One can, perhaps, imagine Clinton failing to keep apprised of something as mundane as a mounting threat to the safety of her personnel in Libya. But surely she was in the loop when it came to a bureaucratic struggle about how our U.N. ambassador was going to spin the Benghazi debacle. And surely, her representatives would not attend the meeting in which that bureaucratic struggle was to be resolved without being able to state the desires of the Secretary of State.

Hillary Clinton, then, is culpable at the front end of the Benghazi disaster — when she and/or her agents ignored requests for enhanced security — and at the back end — when she and her agents engineered an attempted cover-up. Her culpability during the attacks is doubtful in my opinion, but I would still like to know what she was doing during those tragic hours.

In a serious society, Benghazi, standing alone, would spell the end of Hillary Clinton’s public career. But there is much more.

The signature initiative of her time as Secretary of State — the “reset” with Russia — was a fiasco or a farce, depending on how seriously one took it to begin with. I would have had trouble taking seriously an initiative launched with the aid of a fake reset button, even if Clinton had used the correct Russian word for “reset.”

We should also remember that Clinton managed to lose the presidential nomination in 2008 despite having a huge lead and major advantages over her relatively unknown rival. She lost in part because she and her staff couldn’t figure out the importance of winning caucuses in a host of “off-the-beaten-path” states.

Finally, there should be no statute of limitations on Hillarycare. On big matters, failure is the norm for Hillary Clinton.

Despite all of this, Clinton finds herself the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, if she seeks it. And I gather that she is favored to win the general election, as well.

Will Benghazi derail her? I wouldn’t bet on it. First, it’s far from clear that, in 2016, the electorate will still care much about what happened in Benghazi (did it ever?) and about subsequent lying about the nature of the attacks.

Second, and relatedly, before Benghazi can hurt Clinton, someone needs the courage to raise the issue. Would Clinton’s serious Democratic rivals (if any) have that courage? Or would they fear a backlash from an essentially pacifist base that sees this as a Republican issue, and therefore irrelevant, and that may be hell bent on nominating a female?

Would a Republican nominee have the requisite courage? Or would he fear a backlash from female voters offended about suggestions that the first woman candidate for president is, simultaneously, too weak and too conniving for the job?

The Purple Cow said..."Hillary Clinton, then, is culpable at the front end of the Benghazi disaster..."

Nope, that would be the Republican politicians who voted to reduce the budget for Consulate and Embassy security by $300 million.------

Nice try at lying, cow. Not a dime was actually cut from the consulate and embassy security budget. And Hillary still had money to spend millions on expensive electric cars for state department staff the same week she denied additional resources for Libya.

Republicans who voted for Paul Ryan's budget are accused of voting to cut $300 million from embassy security, however the bill did not list any specific cuts. Had it passed the House and the Senate and had President Obama signed it, it may have resulted in cuts to embassy security. or it may not have, depending on how the cuts were implemented.

In any event, the budget never passed therefore there were never any cuts in consulate and embassy security budgets.

Neither of these budget proposals had anything to do with the arc of the Benghazi story, and are merely disingenuous attempts to deflect blame. No one really believes this, not even boneheads like cow.

Field said, "The good news for them is that their enemies belong to the republican party, and those folks have a way of overplaying their hand. They always find a way to snap defeat from the jaws of victory"

Nope. The Dems have been the party who continually overplay and shoot themselves in the foot. This Benghazi thing is it! FOX and O'Reilly,esp are banging away at this obvious cover-up. Pretty soon, Benghazi is going to flare up into a total mess where Obama and Hillary both won't be able to hide. Count on it.

Field, "But the FOX News barrage against all things O seems to be having an effect on the White House. Today they tried to calm the Benghazi waters by reassuring the American people that there is nothing to see and we should move along to more important issues."

Nice, very nice. You know it's coming don't you? This is Obama's shot in the foot. Pray that the GOP does not attempt to IMPEACH him. But one thing for certain, Hillary WILL BE FINISHED as FOX MEDIA gets to the bottom of this cover-up.

Our four dead Americans at the consulate HAD NO AMERICAN PROTECTION AND DID NOT HAVE TO DIE. The Secretary of State and the WH allowed that to happen, and they must be held accountable for the deaths of those Americans serving America.

I am not a Republican but mind you I am angry the way Hillary and the WH handled this mess. It cost precious American lives...UNNECESSARILY!!

""For fiscal 2013, the GOP-controlled House proposed spending $1.934 billion for the State Department’s Worldwide Security Protection program — well below the $2.15 billion requested by the Obama administration. House Republicans cut the administration’s request for embassy security funding by $128 million in fiscal 2011 and $331 million in fiscal 2012. (Negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate restored about $88 million of the administration’s request.) Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans’ proposed cuts to her department would be “detrimental to America’s national security” — a charge Republicans rejected.[GOP vice presidential nominee Paul] Ryan, [Rep. Darrell] Issa and other House Republicans voted for an amendment in 2009 to cut $1.2 billion from State operations, including funds for 300 more diplomatic security positions. Under Ryan’s budget, non-defense discretionary spending, which includes State Department funding, would be slashed nearly 20 percent in 2014, which would translate to more than $400 million in additional cuts to embassy security."

Not a dime was actually cut, therefore the argument that Benghazi was somehow the Republican's fault for cutting the budget is completely baseless.

Even if the cuts had gone through, the State department could have decided that buying $100,000 electric cars could have been scaled back, rather than refusing to beef up security at Benghazi and other high risk consulates.

The SCANDAL was when Obama supported the illegal invasion of Libya by NATO..with US taxpayer's $$$ at the cost of $12 MILLION US dollars a week for months..This was done w/o the supposed required approval of Congress. Of the public figures..only Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader and Ron Paul spoke out against this a declared that he should be impeached. Boehner said he would look into it...but went out over the weekend and played golf w/Obama..and that was the end of that.

With the overthrow of the Gaddafi government..the "ethnic cleansing" of Black Libyans and African immigrants became rampant. The White House and the Department of State continues to this day to ignore it...and invited the head of the NTC to the White House..even after they were informed of this.

From Black Agenda Report:

“Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appeared like ghoulish despots at a Roman Coliseum, reveling in their Libyan gladiators’ butchery.”

Last week the whole world saw, and every decent soul recoiled, at the true face of NATO’s answer to the Arab Spring. An elderly, helpless prisoner struggled to maintain his dignity in a screaming swirl of savages, one of whom thrusts a knife [4] up his rectum. These are Europe and America’s jihadis in the flesh. In a few minutes of joyously recorded bestiality, the rabid pack undid every carefully packaged image of NATO’s “humanitarian” project in North Africa – a horror and revelation indelibly imprinted on the global consciousness by the brutes’ own cell phones.

Nearly eight months of incessant bombing by the air forces of nations that account for 70 percent of the world’s weapons spending, all culminating in the gang-bang slaughter of Moammar Gaddafi, his son Mutassim and his military chief of staff, outside Sirte. The NATO-armed bands then displayed the battered corpses for days in Misurata – the city that had earlier made good on its vow to “purge Black skin” through the massacre and dispersal of 30,000 darker residents of nearby Tawurgha – before disposing of the bodies in an unknown location.

It was not the systematic persecution and lynching of black Libyans and migrant workers from other African countries by one of the thousands of militias that were armed by NATO and co, the persecution of people who were allied with the former government, the tens of thousands of political prisoners arbitrarily detained, the murder of Muammar Gaddafi or the current siege of Bani Walid, that alerted the world to how much chaos has been unleashed in Libya. But the killing of a white man, the US ambassador.

But still that chaos will be portrayed as something that is a result of the uncivilized nature of Libyans/Arabs/Muslims/Africans rather than what it really is…a result of the NATO war that destroyed the former Libyan government and with it the fabric that held the country together in a wider context of decades of western interference in the wider region.

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